by Talbot Mundy
McGregor understood that perfectly. He might not know Ommony as he knew files, the law of probabilities, and criminal statistics; he might, from deep experience, mistrust his own opinion; but he did know that when Ommony poked around in that way, picking up things and replacing them, it was wise to wait and not ask questions. He smoked and watched his servant putting studs into a clean dress-shirt.
“Have you one man you can absolutely bet on, who could take a package to Tilgaun and could be trusted not to monkey with it on the way, or lose it, or let it get stolen?” he asked at last.
“Number 17 — Aaron Macauley, the Eurasian, is leaving for Simla on tonight’s train. He would probably want to spend a day or two in Simla, but he could go on to Tilgaun after that. He’s quite dependable.”
“Yes. I’d trust Aaron Macauley. I want a small box, stout paper, string and sealing-wax.”
McGregor produced them and watched Ommony wrap up the piece of jade and seal it with his own old-fashioned signet-ring. He addressed the package to Miss Hannah Sanburn at the Tilgaun Mission.
“Better tell Macauley it contains bank-notes,” said Ommony. “That’ll give him a sense of importance and keep him from being too curious. Tell him to ask Miss Sanburn to keep the package there for me until I come.”
“All right. Now what’s the theory?”
“Nothing much. I was attacked just now — not serious. The man who got the worst of it will join us after dinner. I’ll give you all the grizzly details then. Might possibly surprise you. See you again at Mrs. Cornock- Campbell’s.”
“Who is a fountain of surprises,” said McGregor, smiling. “Meanwhile, how about protection? Do you want a body-guard?” It was not exactly clear why he was smiling.
“No,” said Ommony, looking contemplatively at Diana, who appeared to have fallen asleep on a Bukhara rug, “I’ve got a more than usually good one, thanks. Observe.”
He started on tiptoe for the door. Diana reached it several strides ahead of him and slipped out first, to sniff the wind and make sure that the shadows held no lurking enemy.
“If men were as faithful as dogs,” he began. But McGregor laughed:
“They’re not. Faith, very largely, is absence of intelligence. Intelligence has to be trained to be honest; it has no morals otherwise. Without a good Scots grounding in religion, the greater the intelligence the worse the crook.”
“Oh, rot!” said Ommony, and walked out, leaving McGregor chuckling.
CHAPTER VI. “Missish-Anbun is mad.”
A certain poet, who was no fool, bade men take the cash and let the credit go. I find this good advice, albeit difficult to follow. Nevertheless, it is easier than what most men attempt. They seek to take the cash and let the debit go, and that is utterly impossible; for as we sow, we reap.
— from The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup
EVEN since the Armistice, when military glory topped the rise and started on the down-grade of a cycle, there are still worse fates than being wealthy in your own right and the wife of a colonel commanding a Lancer regiment — even if your children have to go to Europe to be schooled, and your husband is under canvas half the time. And there are much worse fates than dining with Mrs. Cornock-Campbell, anywhere, in any circumstances. To be in a position to invite yourself to dinner at her Delhi bungalow means that, whatever your occupation, you may view life now and then from the summit, looking downward. Viceroys come and go. Mrs. Cornock-Campbell usually educates their wives.
They say she knows everything — even why the German Crown Prince once cut short a tour of India; and that, of course, means she is no longer in the bloom of youth, and never indiscreet, for you don’t learn state secrets by being young and talkative.
Ommony is one of her pet cronies, though they rarely meet (which is the way things happen in India). He looks such a blunt old-fashioned bachelor in a dinner-jacket dating from away before the war, the contrast he creates with modern artificial cynicism is so satisfying, and he so utterly lacks pose or pretense, that he brings out all her vivacity (which is apt to be chilled when imitation people assume manners for the sake of meals).
The talk, for the hour while dinner lasted, was of anything in the world but Ringding Lamas and the Ahbor country. Ommony was probed for epigrams, coined in the depths of his forest, that should make John McGregor wince and laugh — such statements as that “You can look for faults or virtue. Vultures prefer ullage. Suit yourself. A man sees his own vices and his own virtues reflected in his neighbor — nothing else! Another’s crimes are what you yourself would commit under equally strong pressure. His virtues are greater than your own, if only because they’re less obvious. The most indecent exhibition in the world is virtue without her cloak on!” Not polite exactly, (particularly not to the chief of the Secret Service), but not tainted by circumlocution. And again: “They say the fact that people work entitles them to vote. Horses work harder than men! Soap-box nonsense! The only excuse for work is that you like it, and the only honest objection to loafing is that it’s bad for you.”
John McGregor, in the rare hours when he is not feeling the pulse of India’s restless underworld, is an addict of the Wee Free Kirk with convictions regarding the devil.
“A personal devil?” said Ommony. “I wish there was one! Hell breeds more dangerous stuff than that! If I thought there was a devil, I’d vote for him. He’d clean up politics.”
John McGregor, ganglion of India’s crime statistics and acquainted with all evil at first hand, was shocked, to Mrs. Cornock-Campbell’s huge delight.
“Now, John! What have you to say to that?”
McGregor cracked a nut nervously and sipped at his Madeira.
“He could find a host of half-baked theorists to praise him for the blasphemy,” he said deliberately, “but the ultimate appalling circumstance of being damned is a high price for applause.”
Ommony laughed. “I’d rather be thought damned by a man I respect than be praised by damned fools,” he retorted. “We three will meet beyond the border, Mae. I’m looking forward to it. I can’t see anything unpleasant in death, except the morbid business of dying. ‘May there be no moaning at the bar when I put out to sea.’ It looks as if I might be the first of the three of us to take that trip.”
So, by a roundabout route, the conversation drifted to its goal. Over her shoulder, at the piano, in the rose and ivory music-room after dinner Mrs. Cornock-Campbell tossed the question that brought secrets to the surface. “John says you are going to the Ahbor country.”
John McGregor’s eyes glowed with anticipation, but he crossed his legs and lit a cigarette, throwing himself back into the shadow of an antique chair to hide the smile.
“Going to try,” said Ommony. “My sister and Fred Terry disappeared up there twenty years ago. They left no trace.”
“Are you sure?”
She went on playing from Chopin and Ommony did not notice the inflection of her voice; he was listening to the piano’s overtones, vaguely displeased when she closed the piano without finishing the nocturne.
“I was at Tilgaun seven months ago,” she said. “Colin” (that was her husband) “had to go to Burma, so I went to Darjeeling. I heard of the Marmaduke Mission, and grew curious. I wrote, and Miss Sanburn kindly invited me to come and stay with her. The most delightful place. Please pass me a cigarette.”
“Did Hannah mention me?” asked Ommony.
“Indeed she did. You seem to be her beau ideal; and funnily enough she said you, and the Lama Tsiang Samdup must have been twin brothers in a former incarnation! She told me you and he have never met each other, although you are co-trustees with her under Marmaduke’s will. It sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan. I didn’t see the Lama, but I did meet someone else who is quite as interesting.”
McGregor crossed his legs and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“How well do you know Miss Sanburn?” asked Mrs. Cornock-Campbell at the end of a minute’s silence. She was watching Diana, stretched out on the
bearskin, hunting gloriously in a dream-Valhalla. If she saw Ommony’s face it was through the corner of one eye.
“Oh, as well as a man can ever hope to know a very unusual woman,” said Ommony.
“That doesn’t go deep — does it! I admit I suspected you at first. Then I remembered how long I have known you and — well — you’re unorthodox, and you’re a rebel, but — I couldn’t imagine you leaving a child nameless.”
“What on earth do you mean?” asked Ommony.
“So I suspected Marmaduke — naturally. But all sorts of dates and circumstances turned up quite casually, which eliminated him.I was at Tilgaun a whole month before I was quite sure that Miss Sanburn is not a mother. I was almost disappointed! She is such a dear — I admire her so much — that it would have given me a selfish satisfaction to know such an abysmal secret, and to keep it even on a deathbed! However, the child is not hers. She calls her an adopted daughter, though I doubt that there are any legal papers. The girl is white. She’s about twenty. The strangest part is this: that the girl disappears at intervals.”
“This is all news to me,” said Ommony. “Mac said something, but—”
“It isn’t news you iconoclast! It’s a most romantic mystery. The girl was there when I arrived. She wouldn’t have been; but you know what a business it is to get to Tilgaun. I was supposed to wait for ponies and servants from the mission; they didn’t come, and as there was a party of rajah’s people going, I traveled with them. They were in a hurry, so I reached the mission quite a number of days before I was expected, and I met the girl on the far side of the rope bridge just before you reach Tilgaun — you remember the place? There’s a low steep cliff with only a narrow passage leading out of it. She was sitting there nursing a twisted ankle — nothing serious — but she couldn’t get away without my seeing her; and of course it never entered my head to suspect that she would want to avoid me. She told me her name was Elsa.”
“That was my sister’s name,” remarked Ommony, who had an old-fashioned way of growing sentimental when that name cropped up among intimates.
“I lent her a spare pony and she rode up to the mission with me. Jolly — she was the jolliest girl I have ever seen, all laughter and intelligence — with strange sudden fits of demureness — or perhaps that isn’t the right word. Freeze isn’t the right word either. She would suddenly lapse into silence and her face would grow absolutely calm — not expressionless, but calm — like a Chinese girl’s. It was as if she were two distinct and separate women. But she’s white. I watched her finger-nails.”
“Might be Chinese,” Ommony suggested. “They’re given to laughter, and their finger-nails don’t show the dark lunula when they’re pressed. Hannah Sanburn receives all comers at the mission.”
“I am certain she is English,” Mrs. Cornock-Campbell answered. “But as far as I could judge she speaks Tibetan and several dialects perfectly. Her English hasn’t a trace of Chi-chi accent. She has been wonderfully educated. She has art in every fiber of her being — plays the piano fairly well — mostly her own compositions, and you may believe me or not, they’re fit to be played by a master. And she draws perfectly, from memory. That night at supper, and afterward, she talked incessantly and kept on illustrating what she meant by drawing on sheets of paper — wonderful things — not caricatures — snap-shots of people and things she had seen. Wait; I’ve kept some of them. Let me show you.”
She found a portfolio and laid it on Ommony’s lap. He turned over sheet after sheet of pencil drawings that seemed to have caught motion in the act — yaks, camels, oxen, Tibetan men and women taken in mid-smile, old monastery doorways, flowers — done swiftly and with humor. There was a sureness of touch that men work lifetimes to achieve; and there was a quality that almost nobody in this age has achieved — a sort of spirit of antiquity, as simple as it was indefinable in words. It was as if the artist knew that things are never what they seem, but was translating what she saw of things’ origins into modern terms that could be understood. The drawings were of yesterday, clothed in the garments of today and looking forward to tomorrow.
“She seemed to see right through you,” Mrs. Cornock-Campbell went on. “I don’t believe the smartest man in the world could fool that girl. She has the something within that men instinctively recognize and don’t try to take liberties with. She seemed equally familiar with Tibetan and European thought, as well as life, and to know all the country to the northward. I gathered she had been to Lhasa, which seems incredible, but she spoke of it as if she knew the very street-stones, and you’ll see there are sketches of bits of Lhasa in that portfolio — notice the portrait of the Dalai-Lama and the sketch of the southern gate.
“And all the while the girl talked Miss Sanburn seemed as proud and as uncomfortable as a martyr at the stake! When Elsa began to talk of Lhasa I thought Miss Sanburn would burst with anxiety; you could see she was on the perpetual point of cautioning her not to be indiscreet, but she restrained herself with a forced smile that made me simply love her. I know Miss Sanburn was in agonies of terror all the time.
“When Elsa had gone to bed — that was long after midnight — I asked Miss Sanburn what her surname was. She hesitated for about thirty seconds, looking at me—”
“I know how she looked,” said Ommony. “Like a fighting-man with a heartache. That look has often puzzled me. What did she say?”
“She said: ‘Mrs. Cornock-Campbell, it was not intended you should meet Elsa. She is my adopted daughter. There are reasons—’ And of course at that I interrupted. I assured her I don’t pry into people’s secrets. She asked me whether I would mind not discussing what little I already knew. She said: ‘I’m sorry I can’t explain, but it is important that Elsa’s very existence should be known to as few people as possible, especially in India.’ Of course, I promised, but she agreed to a reservation that I might mention having met the girl, if anything I could say should seem likely to quiet inquisitive people. And that was a good thing, because I had no sooner returned to Delhi than John McGregor came to dinner and asked me pointedly whether I had seen any mysterious young woman at Tilgaun. I think John intended to investigate her with his staff of experts in — what is the right word, John?”
“Worm’s-eye views,” said McGregor. “Not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men could have called me off, as you did with a smile and a glass of Madeira. Thus are governments corrupted.”
“So you’re the second individual to whom I have opened my lips about it,” said Mrs. Cornock-Campbell, not exactly watching Ommony, but missing none of his expression, which was of dawning comprehension.
“I’m beginning to understand about a hundred things,” he said musingly. “You’d think, though, Hannah would have told me.”
Mrs. Cornock-Campbell smiled at John McGregor. “Didn’t you know he’d say just that! Wake up, Cottswold! This isn’t church! It’s because you’re her closest friend that you’re the last person in the world she would tell. She’s a woman!”
Then there were noises in the garden and Diana left off dreaming on the bearskin to growl like an earthquake.
“An acquaintance of mine,” said Ommony. “If you can endure the smell, please let him in. Or we might try the veranda.”
Diana had to be forcibly suppressed. The butler, a Goanese (which means that he had oddly assorted fears, as well as a mixed ancestry and cross-bred notions of convention, that were skin-deep and as hard as onyx) had to be rebuked for near-rebellion. And Dawa Tsering, with his neck swathed in weirdly-smelling cloth, had to be given a mat to sit on, lest he spoil the carpet. It needed that setting to make plain how innocent of cleanliness his clothes were; and his reek was of underground donkey-stables, with some sort of chemical added. (There were reasons, connected with possible eavesdroppers, why the deep veranda was unsuitable.)
“And the knife, Ommonee?” he asked, squatting cross-legged, admiring the room. “Is this thy house? Thou art a rich man! I think I will be thy servant for a while. Is th
e woman thy wife? It is not good to be a woman’s servant. Besides, I am a poor hand at obedience. Nay, return me my knife and I will go.”
“Not yet,” said Ommony, studying by which roundabout route it might be easiest to elicit information. He decided on the sympathetic-personal. The man’s neck had plainly received attention, but the subject served. “Shall I get a doctor for your neck?”
“Nay, Tsiang Samdup made magic and put leeches on it and some stuff that burned. Lo, I recover.”
“You mean the holy Lama Tsiang Samdup? The Ringding Gelong Lama? He who was at Chutter Chand’s this afternoon?”
Ommony knew quite well whom he meant, but he wanted to convey the information to the others without putting the Hillman on guard. By the look in the Hillman’s eye, his mood was talkative — boastful — a reaction from the failure of the afternoon.
“Aye, the same.”
“I should have thought his chela would have attended to that.”
“Samding! Nay, they say that fellow is too sacred altogether. Not that I believe it; I could cut his throat and show them he dies gurgling and whistling like any other man! But the Lama looks after him like an old wife with a young husband and the boy mayn’t soil his fingers. Rebuke thy dog, Ommonee — she eyes me like a devil in the dark. So, that is better. Ohe — I wish I had never come southward! Yet, I have seen this house of thine. It is a wonder. It will serve to speak of, when I go back to Spiti and tell tales around the fire.”
Ommony translated for the others’ benefit, and went on questioning.
“I suppose you will return to Tilgaun with the Lama and his chela?”
